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July 24 - August 17, 2020
The Population Bomb, declared straight-out that “the battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any [policies] embarked upon now.”
By 1980, India had seen a 47 percent increase in grain production, while its population increased 34 percent. Calories available began to increase, not decrease. Today, India produces 328 percent as much grain as it did in 1967, when observers thought it couldn’t produce any more. India is now even the largest exporter of rice in the world. Innovation breaks through impossibilities.
The lesson from history is clear. When we innovate and find a cheap, technological solution, we solve major challenges and generate broadly shared benefits. We need to apply that lesson to the problem of climate change.
Solar and wind power, so far, are not the answer. Even with huge political support and trillions of dollars in subsidies, solar and wind energy provide just over one percent of our global energy needs. The International Energy Agency estimates that by 2040 and even after another $4 trillion has been spent on additional subsidies, solar and wind power will deliver only less than 5 percent of global energy.
The fracking innovation was not intended as climate policy, but simply as a way to make the United States more energy independent and richer. But it also turned out to have a huge climate change benefit, because gas became cheaper than coal.
China is by far the world’s largest consumer of coal. In fact, in each year since 2011, China has burned more than half of all the coal used worldwide; India (12 percent) and the US (8.4 percent) were in distant second and third places in 2018. If China switched its power production partly to gas, its emission cuts would be massive, dwarfing what we have already seen in the United States.
UNTIL WE FIND a green energy source that is cheaper than fossil fuels, it will be hard to convince the whole world to fundamentally turn away from fossil fuels. Yet, if we can innovate the price of green energy down below that of fossil fuels, we will be on the pathway to fixing climate change. Everyone, including China, India, and Africa, and not just the United States and Europe, will switch.
The experts concluded that globally, we need to spend $100 billion on green energy innovation each year. This would still be much less than what solar and wind energy are costing us in subsidies today, and it would likely substantially bring forward the day when low- or zero-carbon-dioxide energy sources can take over the world.
The economists calculated that for each dollar spent on green energy R&D, we could avoid about $11 of long-term climate change damages. This is a great deal. Moreover, besides helping to find a breakthrough green energy source, this R&D will likely generate many other innovations that can be useful for humanity, such as better batteries for cell phones and cheaper power for space exploration.
The most promising progress came in 2015, when twenty world leaders including President Obama promised to double their country’s green energy research and development by 2020. They called their agreement the Mission Innovation.14 Unfortunately, those countries have broken that promise.
The frustrating thing is that almost everyone agrees that we should be investing much more in green innovation. It’s not a controversial idea. Yet, this spending never seems to be actually allocated. That’s because constant scaremongering and green energy industry lobbying lead to scarce resources instead being poured into rolling out more and more of today’s inefficient solar panel and wind turbine technology.
Globally, private companies spend just $6 billion on renewable energy R&D. As a percentage of global GDP, private investment in green energy research has been declining since 2012.
FIGURE 12.1 Green R&D by the United States and OECD from 1974 to 2018 in cents per $100 of GDP. “Promises” signifies what the world leaders promised to spend under Mission Innovation in 2020.
Globally, in 2020 taxpayers will pay $141 billion to subsidize inefficient solar and wind energy. This will buy us just $6 billion in actual R&D. Instead, we should spend $100 billion directly on research and development. It will get us $94 billion more for green R&D, and it would still leave us with $41 billion to improve the world in many other ways.
WHEN IT COMES to green innovation, what should we focus on? This isn’t an easy question, because no one knows what new technologies will power the world in 2050 or 2100.
The real lesson is to realize that although we might have a good idea of where we want to go, we have little sense of which technologies will get us there. That is why we shouldn’t focus our R&D just on the currently most fashionable and glamorous ideas for the future. Instead we should research a lot of ideas.
ENERGY STORAGE IS one area where innovation could make a huge difference to human welfare. If we could store virtually unlimited amounts of wind and solar energy, not only for the seconds or minutes when the wind dies down and the sun is hidden behind a cloud, nor even just for the night or a windless week, but across seasons and even years, storage could deliver energy when we need it rather than when nature deigns to provide it.
The problem with all of these ideas are capacity and cost. If we exclude pumped water storage, all of the other many different solutions in existence today can store just twenty seconds of the world’s electricity consumption. Headlines consistently tell stories of how we will see an amazing increase in storage capacity in just a few years. The International Energy Agency estimates that over the next two decades an extra $300 billion will be spent to increase storage capacity forty-one-fold. Yet, this will still increase the available storage to only eleven minutes of the world’s electricity
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India is already leading the way. It has promised a strong policy push to increase its solar capacity tenfold from 2018 to 2040. (Notice, this won’t end the dominance of coal; its use will also double, so it will go from producing 45 percent of India’s energy needs in 2018 to 44 percent in 2040.)
THE SECOND OBVIOUS AREA for R&D investment is nuclear energy. Nuclear energy doesn’t emit carbon dioxide. Perhaps surprisingly, nuclear energy is also very safe. Under normal operating conditions, it emits less radioactivity than coal (yes, there is actually radioactivity in mined coal that is released when it is burned). Although we think of the terrible disasters of Fukushima and Chernobyl, nuclear energy has one of the lowest death risks of any form of energy; in fact, it kills about two thousand times fewer people than coal power, because of coal’s massive pollution.
The reason why nuclear energy isn’t a silver bullet in its current form is that new nuclear power plants in developed countries are much more expensive than continuing to rely on fossil fuels. Finland’s newest nuclear power unit was supposed to open in 2010 and cost $3.5 billion. It may open in 2021 at triple that amount. France’s Flamanville nuclear power plant was supposed to open in 2012. It may open in 2022, again at triple the cost.
The good thing about R&D is that it is relatively cheap. A hundred billion dollars could fund innovation across a broad spectrum of potential technologies. We should expect most of these ideas to fail. Many will see some progress, but not enough to become economically competitive. Air capture’s cost might fall to $70 per ton, say, but remain too expensive to be used everywhere across the planet. The cost of nuclear power might be driven down to 6¢ per kilowatt-hour, but still not be cheap enough to replace fossil fuels. The Swiss stacking experiment to store energy could, like any other
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But none of this can happen unless we focus on this one thing: we need to ensure that R&D investments increase dramatically. In just a year or two, the United States and other nations need to at least double their annual investments in order to meet the level promised in the Mission Innovation. Over the next five to ten years, R&D spending globally should increase a further three times to get close to the $100 billion annually identified by the Nobel laureates.
A WELL-CONCEIVED CARBON TAX can help us avoid the worst climate change damage, and a large investment in innovation can bring forward the day when the global economy ends its reliance on fossil fuels. But even with both of these policies, the temperature will continue to rise.
Pursuing policies that enable adaptation seems like common sense. Yet weirdly, for a long time in climate change policy discussion, it was considered bad form to even mention adaptation. Climate change campaigners have tended to view the idea of adaptation as distracting attention from cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
RISING SEA LEVELS get a huge amount of attention in the media, and they are often portrayed as uncharted territory for humanity. In fact, sea levels have risen about a foot over the past 150 years. Around the world, when you ask anyone what important events happened over that century and a half, they will talk about wars, medical breakthroughs that saved lives, perhaps the moon landing, but they won’t tell you that rising sea levels were a big deal. Why? Because we adapted to them by protecting our coastlines.
In 1991, at which point Bangladesh had still built only three hundred shelters, it was hit by a much stronger, category 5 hurricane. The death toll was half that of 1970 because the Cyclone Preparedness Program worked. Since 1991, a strong focus on adaptation and the construction of a further thirty-five hundred shelters have seen the death rate cut by more than a hundredfold. In the last three decades of the last century, about fifteen thousand people died in Bangladesh each year because of hurricanes. In the 2010s, thanks to widespread adaptation, the average number is just twelve dead.
To see the difference that adaptation makes, we need only look to the city of Montecito, 450 miles south of Paradise. The city suffered severe fires in the 1960s; in response, Montecito adopted an approach called “adaptive resilience.”
Adaptation should start with cities, because rising temperatures will have the biggest human health impact in urban environments. Cities are increasingly where we live, already accounting for more than half the world’s population, and by the end of the century the figure will be 80 to 90 percent. Moreover, cities are generally much hotter than surrounding countryside: they are filled with masses of nonreflective black surfaces that absorb the sun’s rays and lack green spaces and water features.
But there is an amazingly simple adaptation that can make Las Vegas and other cities cooler.
Most of the alarmism about climate change tends to ignore our ability to adapt. Remember the claims in chapter 1 that coastal flooding in the United States could cost more than our entire current GDP? Such scaremongering relies on the assumption that we will not adapt. But clearly, adaptation will happen, and it will not be through some global treaty, but through local and national decisions. That’s happening already.
